Why I believe the US Government knows where Malaysian Air 370 is.
In June 1968 the US Navy lost the submarine Scorpion. They began a search for this lost Submarine. One of the people who narrowed down the search was Dr. John Craven. Dr. Craven is one of those especially brilliant people who come along about once a generation if you are very lucky. Dr. Craven used hydrophone data from New Foundland, and the Bahama's, to locate the explosion of the Scorpion in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, he used hydrophone data from thousands of miles away to locate a submarine that exploded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean using technology of the era in 1968.
The same technology was used to identify the location of K-129 later that year over 1,500 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Again, hydrophones in the water detected the explosion on the surface of the water thousands of miles away.
Now, some people are going to pretend that we have somehow lost our ability to track things at sea since the 1960's.
Korea Air Lines flight 007. This aircraft was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1983. US Tracking stations monitored the radio calls of the pilots of the Soviet Fighters and moreover were actually tracking the aircraft.
Everyone knows how RADAR works. The radio beam goes out, bounces off the object being detected, and then races back to the antenna. BUT not all the signal bounces back to the antenna. Some is scattered here and there. By picking up these stray signals, you are able to see something.
The flight path of Flight 007 is shown as a solid line, while the anticipated flight path is a dotted line. The US Government "destroyed" the radar tapes of that night within 30 hours of the accident, despite the fact that the loss of the airliner was already known. There is no logical reason to destroy potential evidence, we were not so poor at that time that we could not afford another roll of tape for the recorders.
Our radio interception units picked up the chatter of the pilot who shot the plane down, and the orders to do so by his controllers.
Look at the displays of the COBRA DANE radar system from 1977. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cobra_Dane_Radar_Display.jpg
Notice the simple line drawing on the screen to show what the RADAR is able to pick up. That my friends is the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Now, we fast forward to the last couple years. What is the Government outraged about regarding Snowden? That he is revealing sources and methods. The how they gather the information. This security concern also dictated how we could deal with suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. We could not try them in a civilian court because doing so would reveal sources and methods of how we track them.
We know the Government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to track anyone anywhere. We know that our "Allied" governments are working with us to track anyone anywhere. I find it impossible to believe that the Government after 9-11 and the resulting paranoia and funding for every idiotic program would reduce our capabilities to observe ships and planes at sea to less than we had fifty years ago when SOSUS detected a Soviet Diesel Electric submarine in the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We have SOSUS systems in the Pacific, and Tom Clancy had the Navy tracking submarines halfway across the Pacific ocean in his book Debt of Honor in 1994. Because the systems were widely believed to be that good at that time, don't tell me that they have gotten less capable since then.
The SOSUS sensors would pick up the impact of the aircraft at sea. We won't tell anyone because national security requires that we keep our sources and methods and how accurate they really are secret. RADAR which has not gotten less capable since the 1980's, tracked KAL 007 in 1983 from hundreds and even thousands of miles away. To that end we have added additional spy satellites that are able to record everything that happens below them and are capable of picking up a pack of cigarettes from space.
This is a brief overview of what I honestly believe, with good reason, our Government is capable of and is actively doing regarding the gathering of intelligence. I am not making any of it up. I am not linking to Conspiracy Theory websites. I am taking capabilities from thirty or more years ago in most cases, and adding the normal improvements over the resulting years. In many cases, I am purposely underestimating what advances in technology I honestly believe has been made.
I believe the US Government knows what happened to that aircraft. I also believe they won't tell anyone because doing so would result in revealing their sources and methods which tends to negate the technology when people take precautions against it. The thing that they say will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to repair after the revelations of Snowden.
So while many of us spend hours looking at Digital Globe's satellite pictures hoping to be the one to spot the tiniest of clues, realize that while you are doing so, the Government already knows, but will never say.
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The all-knowing government!
knows what happened and is hiding the info for tin-foily reasons. The CT nonsense is your suppositions of the event, not the author's work. Standard deflection technique.
I defer to you on that. I assume that we on DU don't have access to the latest technology in order to speculate more accurately.
It remains a mystery. We'd have better luck with witch doctors or psychics right now. High tech sources of info have us on Ignore and are not answering the phone.
My left foot tells me the plane may not have crashed and has proceeded leftward but my left foot has on rare occasions been wrong. 
We know nada.
a good idea where the plane is!! If they can keep track of phone calls surly they can track a little old plane 
This is going straight into your MIRT dossier! 
The all seeing eye of the government, something common to just about all conspiracy theories.
speculation without substance. Besides, we all know that this incident is somehow tied to Benghazi...
Savannahmann, the one who never found a conspiracy theory too out there to embrace.
You call me ignorant, then a troll, I'll wait to see what you have next which shouldn't be much. I think you have dug as deep as mentally possible at this point
Twice in one day I've agreed with you.
Easier to make claims than to refute them. Sometimes a lot easier.
Hydrophone data. Let's assume they're still up and running, those devices or something like it. I think that's likely. They're cheap and robust. The example you cite is straightforward: You get the data from a direct line of sight/sound from one point to the source, correlate it with the same data from another point to the source. You draw the lines back to their source. Voila. You'd want a third observation to help be sure, but if you can always go and search.
1. The sub would have been emitting a fairly consistent, identifiable signal. You could look for the signal easily in a variety of data sources. Once nearby, you could use the signal for precise locating. If the plane went down and went "boom" or made a big sound, they'd be looking for a short-lived signal. One that would sound much like many other signals. If they narrowed the range, they'd still be looked for a distributed debris field over a fairly wide area.
2. Direct line of "sound" is important. If there's an island in the way or other land masses what you'd get would be distorted. That area is chock-full of islands. Meaning you'd need a lot of hydrophones. And if you didn't know when to listen, within a couple of minutes, you'd need a heck of a lot of analysis time.
So it sounds like a nice idea, but Charles S. Peirce's observation still holds true. There are a lot of experiments you could do. Manpower and resource limitations make sure most of them never happen, and we rely on expertise to say where to direct staff and resources. The people involved in such observations would have full-time jobs already, jobs presumably considered important. This would require a few people additional.
Radar. Radar usually uses line-of-sight. It's easy for a plane to be too far away to be on a local radar screen. Over-the-horizon radar is "out there," but requires more sophisticated technology.
1. The US government certainly has that technology. It's unclear that it has it precisely *there*. It's like any other technology--it does you no good if it's in the wrong place or unplugged.
2. The US went to airborne early warning systems, planes always in the area at a sufficiently close range to spot what was coming our way, that replaced '60s and '70s over-the-horizon radar systems in many cases. Those would be focused on the area of interest, not 180 degrees away from the area of interest. They'd still be limited by the effective horizon, as well.
3. Radar doesn't say what the bogey is. It just says, "Oh, here's a spot on the radar screen." Some radar trace might well have shown the plane vanishing. But with transponders off, all it showed was a blip on the screen. If nobody was tracking it from before the transponder went off, if nobody goes back and actually looks at and analyzes any recordings, that useful bit of information will remain essentially non-information. Was it a bird? a plane? Superman?
So radar might have the information. It might not.
The third objection is a bit more human-centered. If there was a radar outpost that picked up the signal, it would have a system for recycling information storage space. If the person in charge didn't know that they'd picked up the flight and had a record of its disappearance, he wouldn't have said anything. And even if he did see the flight vanish, he might not have heard what it was in time to preserve a recording. And he might just wait for a request to come in from his supervisor rather than push the possibly redundant information.
By the time a request for information came in--remember, it's been days and we're still not sure where to look--the info might have been destroyed.
But the problem might be worse. The person in charge of providing assistance to the Malaysians and interested in the information may not have a clue that there was a listening post in the right area or that it might have gotten the information. Even if he had asked, "Hey, do we have any resources in the area that might provide information?" the person he asked might not have known. Distributed knowledge isn't usually evenly distributed. If they did find out that a listening post was in the right area at the right time, the information might have been destroyed before the information request made it through channels. Such is the nature of bureaucracy. Once the information is gone, the only point in saying, "Hey, we probably had that information but destroyed it" is to cause one's self shame and embarrassment. That serves no valid purpose (even if others might enjoy causing somebody else shame and embarrassment, I don't consider that a "valid purpose"
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